‘Drug Ads May Skew Health Care in Unhealthy Ways’

Liz Peek’s column against medical advertising [Business, “Drug Ads May Skew Health Care in Unhealthy Ways,” February 15, 2007] ignores how medication and medical device ads empower consumers to participate more fully in their own care.

In the European Union, which has banned such advertising, patients are clamoring to have the ban lifted. European consumers understand that as long as they are uninformed about newer, often more effective drugs, governments can avoid paying for them.

In America, insurers frequently try that same trick, devising formularies that favor older, cheaper drugs. Thank goodness patients have other ways of learning about newer, better ones.

Ms. Peek cites one example of a 50-year-old drug that was more effective than alternatives. Such examples do exist, but a wealth of research shows that patients who have access to new drugs have more rapid recoveries than patients with similar health conditions who are forced to settle for older, patent-expired, generic drugs.

On the issue of medical advertising, keeping patients less informed cannot possibly be an improvement.

BETSY McCAUGHEY
Chairwoman
Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths
New York, N.Y.

‘Campus Polarization’

Amy De Rosa was mostly right when she wrote that the goal of the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative is to help colleges and universities sustain “an open intellectual campus environment where academic freedom thrives” [Oped, “Campus Polarization,” February 15, 2007].

Unfortunately, her description of the initiative as simply advancing “the familiar diversity themes” dismisses new efforts by students, professors, and college administrators to encourage open, rigorous and honest discussions on their campuses.

Clark University in Massachusetts, for example, has used funding from the initiative to bring both pro-life and pro-choice leaders together to facilitate a wide-ranging conversation among students about abortion.

Mars Hill College in North Carolina is hosting a series of forums for students who have expressed concerns about being marginalized in class or on campus, including evangelical students.

These efforts help illustrate the progress that can be made when students are given the opportunity to discuss their differences and learn from each other. Ms. De Rosa’s own concerns about ensuring a diversity of perspectives helps demonstrate why such an approach is more important now than ever.

ALFRED IRONSIDE
Director of Communications
Ford Foundation
New York, N.Y.

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